Felix Dahlke on programming and games

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Why we used Clojure and ClojureScript for Flurfunk

Why have you decided to use Clojure and are you still happy with your choice?

This question has been asked more than once now, and although I answered it in a Google+ comment, it seems you can’t link to those, so here’s a blog post.

I wouldn’t call myself an “old Lisper” (as Thomas did), but I had some experience with Clojure and other Lisps and thought it might be a good choice. We went with Clojure in particular because it runs on the JVM, and we wanted to integrate well with our company’s Java environment.

Clojure code tends to be succinct, readable and easy to change, which was useful since we didn’t have a very clear picture of where Flurfunk should go when we started, nor did we have much time.

ClojureScript, which was only a month old when we began to work on Flurfunk, is a different matter. Wasn’t exactly hassle-free. I think we might have been faster if we had used JavaScript, plus I wouldn’t have been the only one working on it. But I’ve seen ClojureScript get better every month, and was pretty productive after the initial problems were solved. A rewrite wouldn’t have paid off so far.

So to answer the question: Yes, we’re happy with our choices. I don’t think that we couldn’t have done it without Clojure, but it certainly played its part. If nothing else, it kept me motivated. On the other hand, I think we would have seen more collaboration (both in our team and now that it’s open source) if we had picked (J)Ruby and JavaScript.

Those decisions are way too hard and I don’t think there are really right and wrong choices. We both like Clojure, it probably comes down to that.